On March 20th, the openSUSE Project, through Jos Poortvliet, announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Milestone release of the upcoming openSUSE 12.2 operating system. Delayed 10 days, the openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 2 release was actually made available for download on the openSUSE server a couple of days ago, but the official announcement for the release was just published today, March 20th, 2012.

openSUSE 12.2 Milestone 2 brings a few improvements and new updates, but mostly it includes bug fixes found in the previous Milestone release. Dubbed Mantis and powered by Linux kernel 3.3, this second development release of the upcoming openSUSE 12.2 comes with Mozilla Firefox 11.0 as the default web browser, KDE SC 4.8.1, LibreOffice 3.4.4, The GIMP 2.6.12, and much more.

Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.

On March 21st, the VectorLinux team proudly announced the immediate availability for download of the final and stable release of VectorLinux 7.0 Light Edition. After the release of VectorLinux 7.0 on November 27th, 2011, here comes the Light Edition of the VectorLinux 7.0 Linux operating system, bringing new features and improvements.

VectorLinux 7.0 Light is of course based on the VectorLinux 7.0 Standard base and contains four lightweight desktop managers: JVM, IceWM, Openbox and LXDE. VectorLinux 7.0 Light offers four mods of installation, corresponding to the pre-installed window managers.

· On March 18th, Linus Torvalds proudly announced the immediate availability for download of Linux kernel 3.3, which now includes code from the Android project. Among the new features incorporated in Linux kernel 3.3 we can mention support for the TI C6X architecture, the ability to restripe between various RAID profiles in Btrfs, as well as many network improvements. Linux kernel 3.3 also comes with many improvements in various areas, such as memory management fixes, improvements of FUSE, NFSD and GFS2 filesystems, KVM and Xen improvements, and much more. Read more about it here.

· On March 22nd, Iain Farrell, project manager at Canonical's Design Team uploaded the new wallpapers for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin). The wallpapers are not yet officially uploaded in the current development release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, but we have the originals and there are 16 new beautiful photos. There were 20 finalist in the Ubuntu 12.04 Wallpaper contest that took place on Flickr, but looks like four of them were not accepted. Congrats to the authors of these beautiful photographs! Read more about it here.

· On March 23rd, the GNOME Project announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the RC (Release Candidate) version of the upcoming GNOME 3.4 desktop environment, which brings more fixes to the existing bugs. GNOME 3.4 Release Candidate is here to update the usual core components, such as GNOME Contacts, GNOME Control Center, GNOME Desktop, GNOME Keyring, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Screenshot, GNOME Screensaver, GNOME Shell, GNOME PackageKit, GNOME Session, and much more. Read more about it here.